Loving Your Children

This week we invite you to join us as we look at the importance of “Loving Your Children” as defined by God’s Word.

Titus 2:4 says, “Then they [the older women] can train the younger women to love their …children.” This type of love is defined as a warm, affectionate love and it emphasizes enjoyment and pleasure in the relationship.

But before we go any further I would like to share a story with you, one that might be a bit graphic in language and very sad. Barbara Hughes in her book Disciplines of a Godly Woman highlights this article featured in the Washington Post by Charles
Krauthammer’s.

The screaming headline was tabloid-size: “I WAS DESPERATE FOR A BABY, AND I HAVE THE MEDICAL BILLS TO PROVE IT.” The article went on: “Some love-struck movie star? A lesbian celebrity? No. It was Germaine Greer, icon of twentieth-century feminism. ‘I still have pregnancy dreams,’ she confessed, ‘waiting with vast joy and confidence for something that will never happen.’”

Ms. Greer, in Krauthammer’s words, “is the great exemplar of the fiercely independent, aggressively sexual new woman. In 1970 Ms. Greer wrote in the Female Eunuch that women should view motherhood as a handicap and pregnancy as an illness. Greer urged women to be “deliberately promiscuous” and to be certain not to conceive children.

Krauthammer’s article continues: “The one adjective rarely attached to Ms. Greer was domestic. And now she reveals the hollowness that haunts her, the terrible sorrow she feels at what she lost: her chance for motherhood. Many years ago, she now writes, she cared for the infant daughter of a friend. ‘Ruby lit up my life in a way that nobody, certainly no lover, has ever done. I was not prepared for the incandescent sensuousness of this small child, the generosity of her innocent love.’”

You might ask, why the change of heart in Ms. Greer? Why would a woman so against mothering be experiencing the agonizing loss of the very thing she so hated and despised? Because motherhood is the essence of womanhood. I believe that whether or not a woman has children, she is called to embrace the discipline of nurturing. And this aspect of womanhood goes far beyond the physical bearing of children.

You see the word nurture originated in the Latin meaning “to suckle or nourish; the act of nursing” but in the English language its broader meaning includes “to further the development of, to train. Nurturing is really essential for everyone’s well-being. Barbara Hughes says, “It follows then that if a woman’s gentle nurturing touch is missing, society will surely degenerate.”
Genesis 3:20 says, Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.” God’s Word teaches that nurturing life is uniquely female. Women have been uniquely created by God, and like Eve, we have been given a body designed tonurture life. But as Barbara Hughes says in her book, “Mothering is more than the mere mechanics of uterus and breast, it is far more profound.

Ladies, we must cultivate a nurturing spirit whether we are single or married, with children or not. Nurturing is our responsibility before God as a human being and in particular because we are female. The context for where and how we might care for others will be dictated by where God places us – in a home, in a school, in a hospital, in the inner city, wherever. So may our prayer be, “God help us to be faithful nurturer’s whatever season we may be in.” Again, mothering is the essence of womanhood and to live out life as a nurturer in our self-centered culture will be sure to cost us. But the rewards, as Ms. Greer so belatedly discovered, are rich indeed.

Join us tomorrow where we will continue on the topic Loving Your Children.
~ Rhonda Calabello